Catching up with Inbox Mountain, and I am so happy you got your date! And yeah, I get how those feelings can sit alongside the pride in your achievement, and the anticipation. I have not experienced anything of the magnitude of losing Cathy, but in IF patient circles survivor's guilt when friends die is a whole thing (and a recent one in my case), and all I can think is that it must say a lot about both the significance of the person who is gone and the extent to which we (whether through nature or social training I don't know; maybe it's both) find it hard to prioritise ourselves on a sort of existential belief level, even though obviously we do the practical work to keep the show on the road.
I'm not even going to do what I'm sure many people have done and go, "Of course you deserve happiness because [umpteen reasons]" - intellectually you know it, and this stuff just doesn't rest on the intellectual plane. Strange apes that we are, we live in this contradiction that we feel we're just us, whereas the Us that friends see is quite a guy/gal, and likewise they would undervalue and question themselves were the situation reversed.
Catching up with Inbox Mountain, and I am so happy you got your date! And yeah, I get how those feelings can sit alongside the pride in your achievement, and the anticipation. I have not experienced anything of the magnitude of losing Cathy, but in IF patient circles survivor's guilt when friends die is a whole thing (and a recent one in my case), and all I can think is that it must say a lot about both the significance of the person who is gone and the extent to which we (whether through nature or social training I don't know; maybe it's both) find it hard to prioritise ourselves on a sort of existential belief level, even though obviously we do the practical work to keep the show on the road.
I'm not even going to do what I'm sure many people have done and go, "Of course you deserve happiness because [umpteen reasons]" - intellectually you know it, and this stuff just doesn't rest on the intellectual plane. Strange apes that we are, we live in this contradiction that we feel we're just us, whereas the Us that friends see is quite a guy/gal, and likewise they would undervalue and question themselves were the situation reversed.
Wasn’t that the shirt you said was too small? Hmmm… I think it’s too big.
I don't remember what I said. It was too small on me, for a long time, because I was too big. Now the tables have turned.